The Culture of Hope Founded on Faith
Job Meets God
We are coming up on four years of our own Job experience in which we have experienced one after another personal catastrophic events, primarily medical. However, we have not lost all possessions and family, as Job did, and the winter of 2020 for us, considered a very bad year by most, gave us a short cessation of medical issues until COVID hit each of us that summer. And since then the Job experience has continued.
The main lessons from our experience are reflective of Job’s relationship with God. He was an Old Testament saint who understood New Testament redemption hundreds of years before Jesus Christ entered our history. In Job 19:25-26b he proclaims: “I know that my redeemer lives, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: [And after I die and this body is destroyed] yet in my flesh shall I see God” What amazing security Job demonstrated at a time when his heart’s righteousness before God was demonstrated by persistent, faithful sacrifices to God.
Job’s first act when he was under attack from Satan, all his children killed and all his possessions destroyed or stolen, was to fall on his face to worship God, saying “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:20-21). Verse 22 notes that “In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.”
Even when Job’s wife told him he should “curse God and die” (Job 2:9) rather than continue to endure the excruciating physical pain of Satan’s second attack, he responded, “Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10). Again, it is said of Job, “In all this did not Job sin with his lips.”
Then Job began to mourn. Mourning is an inherent human need when things change in our lives, especially in the case of devastating losses like Job’s. It is the necessary process by which we adjust to our new reality even when it is 180° away from what went before. In John 11:35 Jesus Himself mourned the death of His friend Lazarus. Then He went to raise him from the dead.
Job’s friends came to mourn with him and sat in silence for a week before they began to debate him about the sin they were convinced was the cause of his misfortune. Their discussion seems to follow a fatalistic development of thought common to the era and is couched in metaphors appearing to be familiar to them all, like they had had this discussion before. They had a great deal correct about God, but their understanding was narrow. Job counters with his own righteous behavior and understanding of God. Even though he did not sin “with his lips” (cf. Job 2:10), God took him to task for arrogance about his position with God. In Job 38-41, God spoke to Job from the whirlwind, and Job was humbled.
Here again we see a New Testament relationship with God in an Old Testament saint. Through this Job had a personal introduction to God after, and perhaps because of, his response of repentance:
“I know that You can do everything and that no thought can be withheld from You. Who is he that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore have I uttered what I understood not, things too wonderful for me which I knew not. Hear, I beseech You, and I will speak. I will demand of You and [ask You to] declare [Yourself] unto me. I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:2-6).
How precious that Job repented of his error in pride and that God gave him a much deeper understanding of Himself, just as He does with everyone who seeks His face, no matter what is going on around us.
